Leftists Cause California Housing Crisis, Middle Class Exodus

We all know the sad story of California. Once a magnet for Americans seeking opportunity it has become a dystopian nightmare controlled without challenge by the hard-left of the Democrat party.

Every statewide office in California is held by a militant Democrat. The Republican party is extremely weak and the productive middle class is fleeing.

But two populations are staying and growing. There are reported to be 150,000 homeless living on the streets of California’s cities while uneducated, unskilled illegal immigrants are expanding in number every single year; there now are millions of them in California.

California has the highest poverty rate in America and the biggest gap in income inequality between the ultra-rich – mostly Democrats – and the poor. Yet it is one of the richest places on earth, even richer than the entire nation of Britain.

The path that California has followed is classic: It became a super-wealthy place with lots of nice scenery and a welcoming climate and thus it became a magnet not only for Americans who wanted to improve themselves but also for the maniacs, losers, screwballs and moochers.

These people are always attracted to wealth; they live off of it and steal it. That is how wealthy places get sucked dry of their prosperity and optimism.

California started to tip over to the radical left in the 1960s and it has never gone back. The drug culture, the ‘hippie’ culture, the welfare culture and the crazy anything-goes culture, all encouraged and tolerated by opportunistic politicians and con artists in Hollywood and the left-wing universities, started in California and have metastasized on themselves and destroyed the state.

The left-wing takeover has spilled into the business world. Corporations like Toyota are fleeing The Golden State. The company called Intel, the ‘grandfather’ of the Silicon Valley computer giants, has not created any jobs within California since the year 2000.

This is a result of the increasing tax burden and regulatory state emanating from the Democrats. Meanwhile Intel has expanded in Oregon, Nevada, Utah and other places. Toyota moved to Dallas.

This trend also can be seen in the East Coast socialist haven of New York state. Once one of the richest places in the world, it has lost its younger, educated and skilled population by the millions because it has become very left-wing in its policies which has caused businesses, the wealthy and the middle class to feel unwelcome.

New York City lost a guaranteed 25,000 jobs when Amazon was confronted by a vocal, anti-business movement on the Democrat left. Meanwhile rich people are fleeing New York’s astronomical tax rates and taking their wealth with them. This had led to a budget gap over $2 billion.

As California has moved further and further to the left with its militant policies decent and sensible people have felt increasingly less welcome. In addition they have been priced out of urban housing by the booming high-end economies which have pushed up rents, and they are being crushed by outrageous taxes and regulations.

San Francisco is a case in point. San Francisco’s decline is attributable to a blanket tolerance for any kind of awful behavior; exorbitant housing costs; sky-high taxes and regulation; and an explosion in homeless and drug addicts on the streets.

The homeless and drug addicts come out of San Francisco’s long history of “tolerance”. From its bawdy start in the 1850s, the city’s reputation grew and grew over the next 100 years. The bad behavior was always in the background but it burst into the open during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967 when the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a ‘hippie’ haven full of drugs, sex, nihilism and sloth.

The media portrayed the Summer of Love as a great success but ignored the dismal aftermath. By 1969 Haight-Ashbury was a boarded-up dump full of deadbeats and spaced-out crazies.

Today San Francisco has gotten so bad that there are literally computer maps pinpointing the location of piles of human waste on the sidewalk. Drug addicts shoot up in the open and dangerous needles litter the streets. This is American liberalism at its worst.

On the other hand we don’t see such conditions in a rural, conservative, white small town in America.

To make matters worse, modern-day San Francisco has seen relentless increases in housing costs as the economy prospered including in the super-wealthy Silicon Valley area nearby.

There might be some redress if San Francisco were a normal place that encouraged new housing to keep rents lower through the natural law of supply and demand. But SF is not normal.

Nikitas3.com saw a video about a San Francisco laundromat owner who wanted to build a small apartment complex on the land that he owned. But the permit process was so daunting and slow, and the neighborhood reaction so strong in opposition that he gave up.

In short San Francisco thwarts new development in two crucial ways: On the one hand it wants to retain its “charm” and so there is constant opposition to new construction, while on the other hand the city is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Nikitas3.com recently saw another video from a town north of San Francisco where one homeowner wanted to expand his small house. The permit costs alone were $60,000.

Thus we can see how the middle class is being driven out of California since the middle class is rational and only puts up with so much baloney before common sense tells them to pack up and go.

Meanwhile 9News.com reports about the decline in public order in another “tolerant” Western US capital city, Denver, Colorado.

Denver City Council voted unanimously Monday night to lessen the punishment for people convicted of certain low-level crimes like lying in a public right-of-way, urinating in public and panhandling.

City leaders and immigrant rights advocates argued the changes will protect Denver’s immigrant community from facing unintended consequences.

“Many times it becomes a deportable offense if you’ve been convicted of even a minor ordinance violation that’s punishable by a year in jail,” Mark Silverstein said, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

Before the ordinance passed, all violations of Denver municipal code were punishable by up to a year in jail and/or a fine of up to $999.

Here are the offenses which are now considered lower in priority:

… Class 2 offenses, which carry a maximum 60-day jail sentence and no fine.
• Sitting or lying in the public right-of-way
• Unauthorized camping on public or private property prohibited
• Urinating or defecating in public
• Panhandling
• Curfews and closures
• Storage and loading
• Prohibitions
• Solicitation on or near street or highway

How about ultra-hip, ultra-liberal, ultra-wealthy Seattle, the home of Starbucks coffee and Amazon and Microsoft? Same thing. City Journal reported in Autumn 2018:

Seattle is under siege. Over the past five years, the Emerald City has seen an explosion of homelessness, crime, and addiction. In its 2017 point-in-time count of the homeless, King County social-services agency All Home found 11,643 people sleeping in tents, cars, and emergency shelters. Property crime has risen to a rate two and a half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s. Cleanup crews pick up tens of thousands of dirty needles from city streets and parks every year.

At the same time, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. By any measure, the city’s efforts are not working.

Here’s more about “tolerant” Seattle from Jonathanturley.org:

The judges and court staff at Seattle’s King County Courthouse have been fighting to get something done about the disgusting conditions around the outside door. Homeless people left excrement and urine around the door — a stench that is deterring jurors and others from coming into the building. Judges have asked for the city to take action and clean up the unsanitary conditions with a simple power washing and better policing. That would seem a no brainer but objections were heard from city council members, including one who reportedly said that the use of hoses might be racially insensitive or traumatic.

In case you don’t know, that last sentence actually means… get this… that the use of hoses to wash away the filth reminds some lunatic leftists of the water hoses used by police in the South to push back black civil rights protesters in the 1950s. And so they oppose the cleaning up.

In other words, the insanity never ends with these people…

Meanwhile Chicagopressrelease.com reported about another horrible idea advocated by liberals – “waterless” urinals promoted by ‘greenies’ to save water in mens’ bathrooms:

There’s been a stench coming from the second floor of City Hall — and it has nothing to do with the steady stream of Chicago aldermen convicted on corruption charges.

Waterless urinals installed to promote water conservation in the public men’s room outside the City Council chambers have turned into a stinky mess.

The odor got so bad that the “green” urinals are now being ripped out and replaced with the old-fashioned kind at a cost City Hall has refused to disclose.

Disgusting, right? So you can see that liberals screw up virtually everything that they touch. It is no surprise that Democrats are so closely associated with offensive bathroom issues. Meanwhile Tyler Durden on Zerohedge.com reports about California:

Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction.

Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter.

Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline. The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care. The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor. In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation. So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate?

Let’s start our discussion by looking at the rat epidemic in Los Angeles. Thanks to extremely poor public sanitation, rats are breeding like mad, and at this point they have even conquered Los Angeles City Hall…

Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.

A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.

Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.

People from all over the world are drawn to Los Angeles because of what they have seen on television, but it is truly a filthy, filthy place. The number of homeless has been rising about 20 percent a year, public drug use is seemingly everywhere, and there are mountains of trash all over the place. Needless to say, rats thrive in such an environment, and the epic battle that one L.A. journalist is having with rats was recently feature in the LA Times …

Eastside, Westside, north and south, they’re everywhere. If you’re a rat, the California housing crisis has not hit you yet and it never will.

At our house, it sounded like the rats were having relay races in the ceiling, and they don’t wear sneakers. Your eyes blink and your leg twitches as you drift off to sleep knowing that if the plague comes back, you are living at ground zero.

In our garden, they devoured entire heads of lettuce. They destroyed my squash just before it was ripe and ready to eat. They stole my tomatoes, cilantro and Anaheim chili peppers. Were they bottling their own salsa?

The same things that are going on in LA are happening in cities all over the Western US including “nice” places like the state capital of Oregon. Durden continues:

For example, a massive rat infestation recently forced authorities to close a shockingly filthy homeless encampment under a bridge in Salem, Oregon.

Amid the trash, human despair and anguish, one weeping woman prepared to leave the most recent place she knows as home without any real inkling of where she’ll go next.

Terry Balow, an outreach worker with the Salvation Army, has been here for the darker moments of living life under a bridge — anger, mental illness, drug use and human frustration boiling over at times everywhere one looks.

Yet it was a rat infestation and concern about human health that prompted the city of Salem to move the campers out.

“It just grew and grew and got worse,” Balow said. “It’s badder than people can imagine.”

Yes, there have always been homeless encampments in this country, but in modern times we have never faced anything on the scale that we are facing now.

Remember the prosperous 1950s, when we didn’t have these problems, when everyone had jobs? The 1950s that liberals hate?

Indeed homelessness has grown astronomically since then as American politicians have paid no attention to the deteriorating economy and job migration to third-world countries. And now that president Trump is paying attention, the liberals hate him.

Conservative/libertarian activist John Stossel reports about San Francisco:

Each day in San Francisco, an average of 85 cars are broken into.

“Inside Edition” ran a test to see how long stereo equipment would last in a parked car. Their test car was quickly broken into. Then the camera crew discovered that their own car had been busted into as well.

It has been said that “as goes California, so goes the country”, and if this is where the rest of the nation is headed then we are in serious trouble.

When Bill Blain recently visited San Francisco, he was so horrified by what he encountered that he felt he must write about it… I hope my American hosts will forgive me for raising this, but the squalor we saw in The City was frightful. San Francisco has always been one of favourite US cities, but the degree of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse we saw on this trip was truly shocking.

Walking round SF on a Sunday Morning and we saw sights we couldn’t believe. This must be one of the richest cities in the world – home to 4 of the 10 richest people on the planet according to Wiki. I asked friends about it, and they shrugged it off.. “The City has always attracted the homeless because of the mild weather,”.. “It’s a drug thing”.. “its too difficult”… “you get used to it..”

Well, I didn’t.

I found it quite shocking the number of folk sleeping rough on the sidewalks, the smell of weed and drug impedimenta everywhere, the filth, mental illness and degradation on view just a few meters from the financial centre driving Silicon Valley. It’s a city where the destitute seem to have become invisible to the Uber hailing elites. We found ourselves hopping on one of the beautiful F-Route Trolley Buses to find nearly every seat occupied by someone lugging around their worldly possessions around in a plastic bag. It was desperately sad.